The present disclosure relates generally to characterizing circuit defects, and more specifically to automatically characterizing circuit defects using a multitude of strobes during standard cell characterization.
Complex integrated circuit (IC) designs may be put together from a multitude of instantiations of simpler circuits called standard cells from a standard cell library. Standard cells may be electrically characterized at the transistor level using electronic design automation (EDA) software tools such as SPICE to predict the performance of output signal response to input signal transitions on inputs of the standard cells. However, logic level simulation tools are used instead of transistor level characterization when circuits are too complex due to longer simulation times and/or solution convergence problems with transistor level simulation.
Feature sizes on IC designs have continued to decrease and the complexity of process technology has continued to increase according to Moore's Law, which in-turn makes acceptable IC manufacturing yields harder to achieve due to manufacturing defects. Therefore, predicting and/or characterizing the sometimes subtle effects of different types of defects on complex IC performance has become ever more important.